The ship in her mind turns. Arienne concentrates on the sensation of her body turning with it, the movement of the ship underneath her as it heads to its destination. Out loud, she recites a short chant. Power blooms in her mouth.
Arienne opened her eyes, and the ruins in her imagination rose from the eastern horizon like a mirage before fading away. She stood up and turned to the direction of the mirage.A brief dizzy spell made her lean on Aron’s neck. Ever since she stepped into the land of Mersia, the flow of her Power had become erratic.
Arienne had paid attention to every rumor about Mersia that had come her way. While they were uniformly ominous, the most disconcerting one of all was that sorcery was of no use here. Without her magic, she would just be a teenage girl with no special talents. The prospect scared her—but then she thought of Loran, the King of Arland. Hadn’t Loran been an unremarkable widow of thirty-eight before she jumped into the volcano to save her country?
The wind changed direction again, and blew sand in her faceagain. But Loran’s request echoed in her mind. Arienne’s initial plans after the war had been to find a way to hide Arland’s gifted children from the Empire, to teach them what she knew of sorcery and create a real school for sorcerers, unlike the death trap that awaited them in the Imperial Capital.
But Arland had just barely managed to obtain a fragile autonomy; to not follow in Mersia’s doomed footsteps, Loran knew, the Arlanders needed to learn all they could about the Star. So, Arienne had journeyed a long way, determined to fulfill that mission.
Loran would have understood if Arienne had turned down this mission, but it wasn’t only because of her king that Arienne was here now. She needed to come to this place, this land once ruled by the Grim King Eldred, to understand her own sorcery better. And while the country was said to be an utter wasteland, Arienne could not shake the feeling that there wassomethinghere that Mersia had left behind for her.
She pulled the donkey’s reins toward the new direction shehad found, but Aron refused to budge. The horse seller had said there would be no better companion to make it to the other side of the mountains with than this donkey. That he was obstinate, but a less stolid fellow would never even make it to Mersia, let alone have the gumption to set foot in it. Arienne was starting to regret that obstinance. She pulled again on the reins, but Aron did not give.
“Let’s go, Aron! Do you want me to leave you behind?” she threatened, convinced he could understand her. “Would you be happy with that? The sun is setting soon!”
Aron had all the food and water, so she could never actually leave him behind. But the threat worked, as he finally began plodding where she led. A broken-off shrub rolled past them in the wind. The dust now hit her left side instead of her face, which felt like a small mercy.
There was truly little here but dust. For three days, the gray skies overhead remained without a trace of sun. During the starless nights, the cold cut to the bone.
But it was said there was something more frightening in the night here than just the cold. Arienne gathered her robes about her with her right hand and with her left stroked the glass orb she wore around her neck. She had bought it before crossing the mountains, sold to her as a talisman for warding off ghosts, created by the rhymesmiths of the Mersian city of Iorca before the Empire’s coming. She didn’t know how much longer it would take to find the city of Danras. Until then, she could only hope that this tiny orb riddled with cracks would protect her from the terrors of the night.
Without pausing in her steps, she opened the door to the room in her mind. She had collapsed her previous room when fightingEldred two years ago, so she had built this new one to resemble the room that briefly gave her shelter during her escape from the Imperial Capital. She could barely remember the face of the man who had helped her, but every time she came into this room, she wondered what he could be doing now. Only two years had passed, but it felt like so long ago.
It was bright outside the window from the pale streetlights of the Imperial Capital. She sat on the edge of a large bed in the middle of the room. Right next to the bed was a crib under the window and inside lay little Tychon. Arienne reached out and gently tapped his small, plump hands, and Tychon stirred a little in his sleep.
She remembered how she had defeated Tychon’s father, Lysandros, at Finvera Pass. The memory used to make her shudder, but now she only felt gratitude that she managed to win and escape with her life—and Tychon.
He was a baby with pink cheeks and sparkling dark eyes, but outside of her mind, he was nothing more than the carefully preserved corpse of a baby inside a small coffin of lead. Now that she had hidden him inside this room, she would never take him out. Never again should he be anything else than this happy child in this peaceful room.
The direction of the winds changed again. These spontaneous shifts did nothing but confuse and annoy her. Sighing, she lifted her head. An eastern patch of the gray sky was turning darker, fading into black. Night was falling on Mersia.
Aron stopped her again. After one more glance at the darkening sky, she looked about them for a place to spend the night. In the distance, she could see what looked like the ruins of a hamlet. But the horse seller beyond the mountains had warned her—Venture notinto where people once lived.For the past two nights, there had been large red rock outcroppings in the shape of arches under which she could set her tent and light a fire, but there were no such structures in sight tonight. Sleeping in the open fields with no protection had to be avoided as much as possible. There had to be a hillock orsomethingthat could block this infernal wind. Arienne gave a firm tug at the reins as she walked on.
Suddenly, she lost all control of her body. Her lungs filled not with air, not with water, but with something else as her vision turned to white and then faded to black—then her whole body dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings were cut. A feeling of helplessness and despair overwhelmed her. Her right cheek hit the ground, her arms refused to move, and her mind refused to think.
This place might have been absent of life, but there was a presence of something that should not exist. A chill of the soul. A spiritual hunger that permeated the air like fog. Mersia until that moment had been mere wasteland; now Arienne was reminded that it was where the Star had unleashed a massacre.
The invisible fog of chill and hunger began to take on shapes around her, a crowd of people forming in thin air. Figures like unfinished sketches, scores of them, hundreds, passed by in the dark wastelands. The hooves of the phantom horses made no sound, and the lips of the phantom people wearing wide-brimmed hats mouthed inaudible words.
Curled up on the ground, Arienne used all of her might to bring both of her hands to the orb around her neck. She rubbed the cool glass, feeling its scratches and cracks. Nothing happened—herPower wouldn’t flow to it, no matter how much she willed it to with what little strength she had left.
The ghostly crowd walked on by, the hooves of the horses piercing her innards with ice whenever they passed through her body. Arienne wasn’t sure how long it had been before one of the horses stopped and its rider dismounted. The rider wore tattered leather clothes, charred in places. As the ghost approached Arienne, she saw that he was a man, his head hanging from his neck at an uncomfortable angle. The ghost bent forward and gazed down at Arienne.
Terrified, she tried to bury her face in her knees. She silently begged for the ghost to stop paying attention to her and to continue on his way. But the ghost kept gazing at her. Unable to resist, Arienne looked up slightly, and their eyes met. A face with a short mustache. Empty, sad eyes.
“Child, what are you doing in this place? No longer do we have leather or meat.”
His words were as cold as ice. Arienne, barely able to breathe, tried to say something, but the only word that escaped her was “Why…?”
The ghost’s face instantly began to melt. His skin—mustache and all—slid off, revealing his cheekbones, then the rest of his skull. Breathing was now impossible.
The skull spoke.
“Why has Mersia become what it is now? Or what became of the great green steppe and the herds of oroxen, the beautiful city of Danras?”
She barely managed a nod. Clumps of hair from the hanginghead of the ghost dripped down to the ground and vanished where they fell.
“Are you an Imperial? Did you come here because there is still something you haven’t destroyed yet?”
